The Force of Will
by Hawkins437
Summary: He has made a significant scientific breakthrough at age 19, built the world's first functioning time machine by 20, indirectly caused the collapse of time and fixed it... but for all his genius, he is lost navigating basic human emotions, hopeless at displaying them. He has the brains to save the world from falling apart, but can he salvage his own life?
1. Alison

He uses marihuana to concentrate. It helps him streamline his thoughts when they run rampart in his mind. Which happens more often than not; the ideas seem to swirl about endlessly in his skull, distracting him even from the most basic human needs such as food, hygiene or sleep. There is always something else to take care of first—another thought to note down before it swerves out of existence, a schematic to scribble, or calculations to be done without delay.

What he neglects, she always tries to make up for, going above and beyond her duties as his personal attorney. After all, which other attorney would bring their client pizza after 10 pm.

She knocks on the workshop door, but doesn't bother waiting on the answer. It's why she had the keys after all.

"Will?"

They met at university through her college friend who was researching along with Will. Already at that time, a generation younger than most of the other researchers he seemed to know more than the rest of the team could understand. And already at that time his mind seemed to wander.

"Alison Cunningham, law." she said when they were first introduced.

He shook her hand awkwardly. "William Joyce."

She vaguely remembers mentioning that she really liked books of his namesake James Joyce as a way of small talk, but the remark fell on deaf ears. Soon, she would find out that he was just as rambling as the Irish author's writing.

They got into a custom of grabbing coffee or lunch together for lack of anyone else to hang out with. Her friend soon found other engagements and, later, an engagement, and Alison has never been one to enjoy third wheeling. Besides, Will's theories fascinated her—or maybe it'd be more fitting to say that _Will_ fascinated her. As for him—he needed her. She handled all his paperwork from simple transactions, to grant applications. He was the brains and she navigated the shark-infested waters of bureaucracy for him.

And sometimes even his diet.

"Will? You there? I brought food."

In the very back of the room she could see sparks flying in the dim light, welding.

She would never get used to how vast the workshop was—and how cluttered; a multitude of computers here, boxes piled up over there, various parts and papers scattered over any desks in the vicinity. And now, in the middle of it all stood a huge circular structure, the purpose of which she could not even begin to guess.

"Will." she said, touching his shoulder gently when she finally made her way across the repurposed warehouse. "Snack break."

"Alison." He startled, almost burning himself on the hot metal. "I didn't hear you coming."

"Of course you didn't." she chuckled. "But you could've seen me if you didn't have your head up in the clouds... or is it Meyer-Joyce field now?"

"Actually homosphere has nothing to do with—"

She interrupts him before he manages to sit her through an entire lecture on the subject. "I know. It's a joke. Pizza?"

He nods, "Yes, please. Let's take it to the front. Less dirt there."

"Speaking of dirt," she says, navigating the forest of metal rods and pipes back to the front of the workshop. "You've been wearing that shirt for two weeks now."

He shrugs. Her eyes narrow in understanding, "You've been sleeping in here again, haven't you?" The sweaty mattress right by one of the computer desks answers her question for him.

She watches him gorge himself on the pizza, ravenous as an animal that hasn't eaten in several days. He wipes his greasy hands on his pants and she groans. "Wow. You really don't dress to impress, do you?"

"It's not me that should make an impression." he says, pointing towards the structure behind them.

"All right, impress me. What is it that you've been working on?"

"It's a time machine."

"You're kidding." But Will isn't much of a joker—and certainly not one that would go this far for a joke. "You're not kidding." Her mouth flies open at the realisation that the structure behind her is indeed a time machine.

She watches his eyes light up like a Christmas tree as he begins to explain to her the intricacies of time travel, somehow involving his pet hamster in the early experiment.

"Hold on..." she says. "You created a miniature black hole to send your pet hamster through time? This is a whole new level of crazy."

"Are you surprised?"

"Not one bit." she laughs. If indeed there was a thin line between genius and madness, then Will had always been tiptoeing, if not outright swinging, on the edge between the two extremes.

"So how does it work?"

"Picture time as an egg," he says. "If you move the egg clockwise, it travels to the future. If moved counter-clockwise it'll go to the past. At that moment two eggs exist—future egg and the past egg..."

"Sounds simple enough, but why is there an egg in this?"

"It's anything but simple—we're talking manipulation of the Meyer-Joyce field through a rotating black hole. Any miscalculation could cause the field to collapse—time would explode and stop entirely. Boom. Finito. No more time. That time egg would be fucked." he exclaims excitedly.

She raises an eyebrow, "Will—"

"Fair enough, I need to replace the egg with something else."

"Yeah, you do," she laughs a little. "But what I meant is—" Her hand snakes its way into his greasy palm and presses it firmly. "Are you okay?"

He fidgets a little, unsure how to respond to something so intimate as a touch, "Huh?"

"I mean... if it works, it's going to be an amazing breakthrough and all, but... all this talk about calculations, the time collapsing; it sounds like you're under so much pressure. Will, I—" _I love you,_ she almost says, but catches herself in the nick of time. That's not something he needs to hear. "I worry about you." she says instead.

He gets up and starts pacing, fidgeting with his hands as he tends to do when pondering. Her hand drops into her lap, abandoned.

"My calculations are sound." he says. "Should be. I took every precaution. Even conducted that live subject experiment with Schrodinger on a miniature prototype—" As he speaks, his eyes flit towards a nearby marker board; he traces the equations with his fingers, recalculating, just in case.

She can see him slipping into that territory beyond reality—the far side of Will—that rambling, anxious, overanalysing self of his.

She diverts his attention back to the present while it's still possible. "So when are you taking me to see dinosaurs?"

"Well, that's the bad news—you actually can't use it to go see dinosaurs. Sucks, I know. And before you ask, no—can't go back and kill Hitler either. That sucks, too."

"So what _can _you do?"

But Will's mind is already racing in its own track: "Jump that big would require a massive amount of chronon energy; even if it were possible to source that many chronon particles with the technology that I have available—which it's not, then you're still facing a less philosophical issue."

She tilts her head as a way of showing that she's paying attention.

"The machine can only send you through time as far as the first activation of its core—the core _is _the machine. Think about it—no machine, no travel. Time is not a portal—you travel by entering and exiting the corridor, which means you always exit where the machine is located at the time. If it didn't exist then—"

"Then you can't travel there, I get it." she nods. "So when are you going to fire up the DeLorean?"

"Tomorrow."

On the February 28, 1999 the world would change. She did not yet know how, but she wouldn't let him face the consequences alone. Just in case.

"Cool. I'll bring eggs."

He laughs, but his expression immediately grows serious, "No, you really shouldn't. The miscalculations, the explosion... I wasn't kidding."

"That's why you'll need somebody to ride the shitstorm with you. And maybe clean up afterwards."

Somebody had to take care of him, if he himself wouldn't.

"Which reminds me—I'll be taking that shirt. Pants, too."

Occasionally that also meant doing his laundry.

"You clean up pretty well."

She had asked him to come with her to the university ball years ago. It was the last time she can remember him putting any effort in his looks—and even then she suspected it had been his mother's nagging rather than genuine interest on his part. She had dolled up for him, had an expensive dress made, but in the end, after a few fumbling attempts at dancing, they spent the evening drinking up the punch bowl and smoking weed on a rooftop, watching stars. He was explaining black holes to her in his usual long-winded, winding fashion. She kept thinking of how differently she had imagined that night would go.

"Will you be my date?" she had asked.

"Okay."

She was disappointed by his underwhelming reaction, as if she'd just asked him whether he'd like sugar in his coffee.

Everyone assumed they'd been dating. Alison would have loved to tell her friends that, alas Will clearly didn't have the social awareness to gauge the situation by himself, and Alison herself never spoke up, not wishing to make things awkward in case he didn't reciprocate. As a result she would find herself in this stalemate situation for years to come; frustrating to be sure, but to her their friendship was too precious to gamble on.

"You really don't need to fuss." he says.

"Do you really think I'd offer if I minded doing it?"

He has no argument to retort with.

"I'll swing by tomorrow to check up on you. Don't blow yourself up in the meantime."

He makes vague promises while nervously fidgeting. For the moment, it puts her mind at ease.

But when she comes by the next day, the whole place is in disarray. The door to the workshop flung open, muffled cries coming from the inside. She races towards the silhouette huddled and moaning on the ground.

"Will? What the hell happened? And who are you?" Her words fall on the woman crouching on the other side of his body, trying to soak the blood from Will's gunshot wound with her hoodie.

"I'm Beth Wilder. I came through the machine, long story." the woman says. "I'm on your side."

Alison has the presence of mind not to question the situation, focusing instead on Will's continuous blood-loss. "I better fetch the first-aid kit."

For the moment she is grateful for the times she's had to literally sort out Will's mess and tidy the place up—the familiarity helps her navigate the layout of the workshop with ease even under stress. It's the only reason she knows where to look for the first-aid kit—because she put it there. Otherwise Will would be liable to bleed out right now.

She can hear the woman's voice, albeit muffled, drifting away as she passes out of earshot. "Will, I know it's a lot to take in, but you have to listen to me—"

From what she can tell something bad is going to happen, related to Will's work. But she won't find out just what for another seventeen years.

The conversation hushes as soon as she returns, but she disregards that detail. With some effort, she manages to stop the bleeding, but her girl scout camp medical training can only do so much.

"We should get you to the hospital." she says.

The following weeks are jumble of paperwork, stress and unanswered messages.

She tries to visit Will at the workshop several times, but her keys no longer fit—the door locks have all been changed. When she calls, Will never answers his phone. Never calls back. Once he comes to see her in her office. He is distant, almost professional, when he asks her to buy the Bradbury Swimming Pool building, but under that facade he's nervous, his hands are shaking. She tries to get through to him. He shakes her off.

They don't talk after. The last message he sends her reads: _Stop coming by the workshop. I'm working on something big. It's not safe._

It breaks her heart when she has to muster all her formality to convey that the purchase was a success.

_Will,_

_I put all of your paperwork regarding the purchase of the Bradbury Swimming Pool in this folder. I knew you'd lose track of the documents otherwise. I've made sure that the purchase can't be traced back to funds from your research grant. I don't know what you're up to, and it's not my business to ask, but we've known each other long enough for me to say this: I trust that you know what is best for you but I can't pretend that I'm not concerned. Your career is showing so much promise and your recent actions feel like a drastic turn in a direction I can't begin to understand. I kept my promise and haven't told Jack (or anyone else) about this, but he's worried about you, even if he doesn't know how to show it. Jack hasn't heard from you in months. He needs you._

_Your attorney and friend,_

_Alison Cunningham  
March 29th, 1999_

_I need you_, she might have added had she been just a little bit less of a coward.

Sometimes she visits the workshop, hoping against hope that this time he might answer the door. A few times she bumps into that woman—Beth—on the way. Her brain comes to the worst possible conclusion, a sharp pang of jealousy in her gut. A feeling she has no idea how to cope with. Whenever she sees her, she just mutely hands over the food as if acknowledging some manner of defeat. She knows he keeps in contact with Beth—and _only_ with Beth.

All the same, she waits. She waits for him to reconnect with the reality. To call. She gives up waiting in 2009.

She loved a scientist, so naturally she marries a jock.


	2. Jack

They were dead. They were dead and he was just standing there, staring at the coffin. I was bawling my eyes out, not believing that mum and dad were really gone. But I'd tried pinching myself and the grave was still there. The funeral was still going. It wasn't a dream however much it felt like a nightmare. And my brother didn't do a thing. He looked numb, robotic as people hurled their condolences at him and he just nodded as he accepted them. And here I was—twelve-years-old and totally losing it.

I don't remember much of the ceremony. There were the coffins, the priest, the flowers withering in the frosty December weather. Across, Paul was trying to look solemn while his eyes were puffy and red. His father had been giving a speech. Alison had asked him to—somebody had to say something if Will was unable. Mr Serene was a good speaker.

Alison had held my hand through the whole thing. I'd have probably run away if it weren't for her. She said nothing, just kept producing more handkerchiefs for me to blow my nose into. There were tears glistening in her eyes, too, but she was trying her hardest not to sob. She squeezed my hand harder whenever she felt herself slipping.

I remember that day she never so much as looked at Will.

It didn't use to be like that. She'd always find excuses to see Will before.

She knew my parents well; used to babysit me for them. Before long she became a part of the family. They would invite her to festive dinners. Alison's own parents lived on the West Coast; she moved to Riverport for her law course. Money was tight. She was barely scraping by and couldn't afford to go see her family. So my parents would compensate.

From then on, she'd have to compensate for them.

It was Christmas.

Last year we were all sitting around the table, laughing, gorging ourselves on the turkey my mum had prepared. Today was a twisted echo of that memory. Mum had always insisted that we pray before the Christmas meal. Instead, the priest called us to a prayer before the coffins were to be lowered into the ground. The words dragged on for eternity. The bells rang inside my head.

"Alison?"

She startled as if hearing her name for the first time after years of silence.

"I need to get back to work." he said. Already he was casting me off as if none of this involved him.

Her back to his voice, she nodded, "I'll drive him home." Then, turning slightly, she caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye. "Will? What are you working on?"

"I can't tell you. It's risky. I need you to stay out of it. Especially Jack."

Her gaze dropped to the ground. "Of course."

"I'm right here, you know." I said.

"Yes. And now you'll go home with Alison."

They made him my legal guardian. The first thing he did was to discard me.

She made brisk steps down the frozen path to her car with me in tow. Once inside, the tears that had been welling in her eyes turned into a waterfall. That short interaction with my brother was what it took to send her over the edge.

She pressed her forehead against the wheel and sobbed for what felt like hours. Mascara dissolved on her cheeks.

"This is messed up, Jack." she said. "So wrong. I... I don't know what to do."

"I want pancakes." I said. It was the most normal thing I could come up with in the situation.

"Okay." she smiled through her tears. "I can work with that."

She had called in sick at work and stayed with me until the New Year's Eve. We spent the days eating pancakes and popcorn and watching the reruns of Address Unknown together. It worked to instil some sense of comfort. It reminded me of the nights Will would actually spend at home. He'd be solving complex science problems and have the TV on for the background noise. I'd be pretending not being able to sleep to spend time with him, watching Night Springs while his mind worked away, only partially paying attention to the show. Mum would always scold him for letting me stay up late.

I remember it was one of the episodes of that show that got him into quantum physics in the first place. A Quantum Suicide. In it, a scientist builds a machine that prevents his death in one reality by killing himself off in another in order to prove the existence of multiverse. He ends up shooting himself. It tells you a lot about Will's sanity that he should see this and think to himself: I want to do that. He was about fourteen then—his sanity hasn't improved since.

"Do you think he'll ever come home?"

In the hindsight, I don't envy her having to answer that question. Who ever knew what was going on inside Will's head—he only confined in my plush giraffe.

She sighed, "If knew that, I might consider switching careers. There's good money in the fortune telling business."

"He knows he's supposed to take care of me now, right?"

"He knows, Jack."

"So why isn't he? Why isn't he here?"

"I guess, whatever he's doing, he might believe that that's the best way to take care of you right now."

She was placating me then—I knew that—but somehow she ended up being right all along. But I was having none of it; I was just an angry kid that wanted his brother to come home, watch TV and talk to me—be it through a pet giraffe.

When I was younger, I would imitate him, claim that one day I was going to be as smart as him. Obviously I turned out very differently, due in no small part to him.

What followed was Will's most extreme bout of isolation yet. I had buried my parents and lost a brother in the same day.

The whole experience set off my teenage rebellion phase early.

"Hey! This is private property. You're trespassing." the guard had called out, flashlight in hand.

"Well, shit."

"I'm going to have to call the police." the guard said.

"No, please—sir, you don't understand..." I tried to explain, but he was having none of it.

"Coming here is against the law, son. Rules are rules. They apply to everyone."

And that's how I got busted the first time.

"It's three a.m., Jack," a tired voice said as I was making that embarrassing phone call, the first out of many to come. "Whatever you need, I'm sure it can wait till I've slept."

"Yeah, well, it's urgent." I said. "I need you to bail me out."

She sighed into the phone. "Okay, be there in ten."

It must've been the first occasion on which I felt grateful that mum and dad didn't live to see this. I felt grateful for Alison. She took the whole thing in stride. No lectures, no drama. Simply made all the arrangements and drove me home afterwards.

I acted like a little shit.

"What were you doing in the drydocks?" she had asked.

"You know that saying—if mountain will not come to Muhammad—"

"You went after Will." she concluded without much effort.

"Jackpot."

She was focused on the road. She didn't judge or scold me. On some level, I found that infuriating.

"You're awfully calm about this." I pointed out.

Outside of the car window the world mirrored her calm—it was a dark, empty night. I found no release for my frustration in watching the streets of Riverport.

"It's not my first tango." she said. The car swerved to a turn. The streets subsided into a spacious countryside. "Not with a Joyce anyhow." she muttered.

"You mean...?"

"That you and Will have more in common than you realise. Interfering with my sleeping patterns included."

The car had come to a halt. Alison killed the engine and beckoned me outside. We'd arrived at the Joyce farm.

"This is the final stop. Please exit the vehicle." she mouthed jovially, but her expression grew serious. I underestimated her level of ease with the situation. She was not beyond a lecture after all.

As soon as the door of the house closed behind us, she said: "Look, Jack, I'm not your mum, so it's not my place, but seeing as I'm currently the only self-aware adult in your life—" she took in a deep breath. "We really need to discuss your actions."

"Did you give the same lecture to Will when he got his ass busted?"

"Your brother has a mental illness—"

There it was—the hatch to vent my frustration. I latched onto it and started yelling.

"That's the thing. Everyone is always making concessions to Will!"

"He's going through some rough time, Jack." Her voice was weary, automatic, as if she'd had this conversation before. She must have anticipated the scene and prepared her arguments in advance. She was an attorney, all right.

"Yeah, well, look, I don't care. I lost them same as he. But I'm still here. Why the fuck can't he do something? Why isn't he here?"

She tried to hug me, but I pushed her away.

"You're on his side. Don't think for a second I forgot that."

"Jack, I'm trying to help. He's working on something important—"

I was being unfair. Between her and the Serenes, I always had someone to lean onto. She was doing her best to try and keep an eye on me while working two jobs and finishing her doctorate. But I was angry and determined to push her—anyone—to their limit, like I had been. The unhealthiest of coping mechanisms.

"What the fuck can be so important that he neglects his own brother? It's a piece of shit excuse."

The way she fixated on the wall behind me rather than meet my gaze told me that she knew more about the situation than she had disclosed. She knew something! The detail served to fuel my anger further.

"He neglects himself, too—" Her voice was cracking; the rehearsed material wouldn't suffice in this fight. I made for the final push.

"Why the fuck are you so wound up about him anyway? He doesn't care. All he understands are his fucking numbers. It's all he cares about. If he doesn't give a shit about his own brother, why would he give a fuck about you?"

The words hit too close. I watched her crumble like she did after the funeral. Tears in her eyes were threatening to spill.

"Because I love him, Jack!" she screamed. "And however inept he is as a caretaker, he is every bit as terrible at taking care of himself, too. Somebody has to do it. And I don't trust anyone else with it. He's my responsibility." she wiped the wetness off her face with the back of her hand. "However much he limits my efforts."

One day, Alison would become the prototype bear mum, not unlike my own—dead and buried—mother. It deepened my appreciation of her character, but it also made me miss mum more. All of them. But the loss of the one still living hurt the most.

"I miss him."

Her voice was barely a whisper, "I miss him, too." it said.

I felt embarrassed of adding to her burden, but at that age all I knew about comforting people was the song my mother used to sing to me, and that a mug of hot cocoa always helped to quench Will's frustrations. I used to bribe him with it late in the night, exchanging it for a bedtime story. He hated being distracted from his studies, but I loved the erratic way he'd read to me and get carried away by the smallest references to science, go off on a tangent and explain how such and such idea would work or why it wouldn't.

I would let my stuffed giraffe do the talking, blame it for my late night visits to Will's room.

"Giraffey wants to hear a story."

At first he didn't look up from his papers, busying himself with his studies.

"I'm sure Giraffey is old enough to read his own stories." he said.

His room had been full of stacks upon stacks of paper, books, scientific journals. He had memorised the content of most of them, down to the specific pages. They called him precocious—still a teenager and already admitted to a university. Every door was open to him. He decided to stick to Riverport against everyone's better judgement. It was a practical decision—at the end of the day, he would always go back home where he'd be cared for. The university benefited, attracting more intelligentsia and funding to its quantum physics department, forming a successful research team around Dr. Henry Kim and his students, of which Will and his colleague Elton Meyer went on to gain the most notoriety.

I put the mug of cocoa on the desk, the bottom made a dark circle on of his papers, a schematic of some kind.

"Damnit, Jack, what did I tell you about—" he looked at me doing my best impression of a puppy. "Okay," he nodded, rubbing the bridge of his nose with a sigh, "Story."

I hopped on his bed, burying myself in the squashed, musty pillows. He never made his bed.

He picked a book from a shelf where he'd keep his favourite fiction books, most of them related to science somehow—Jules Verne, Brave New World, The Lost World, Isaac Asimov, a collection of H. G. Wells...

The book he chose was a dog-eared paperback with a broken spine; its pages were yellow, some passages heavily underlined with an unsteady hand, the margins littered with scribbling notes. He'd gotten the book used from a library clear out sale. It was his favourite.

He thumbed through the pages until he found a passage marked with post-it note sticker.

He read, his voice hesitant at first, he was not rhetorician. But as he went on, his voice became surer, as if no longer reading but becoming one with the character, arguing his own point to the opposition.

_"And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from the present moment."_

_"My dear sir, that is just where you are wrong. That is just where the whole world has gone wrong. We are always getting away from the present moment. Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave. Just as we should travel down if we began our existence fifty miles above the earth's surface."_

_"But the great difficulty is this," interrupted the Psychologist. "You can move about in all directions of Space, but you cannot move about in Time."_

_"That is the germ of my great discovery. But you are wrong to say that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of Time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilised man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?"_

He would frequently interrupt the flow of the words to put down a note, muttering under his breath, staring at the ceiling as his brain went through the numbers.

"Will?" I said. "Do you think it could be done? Time travel?"

"Sure it can," he said, bright-eyed as ever. He always was when talking science. "Once science figures out how."

"You're a scientist. Can you do it?"

"As a matter of fact, that's what we do at the university, with my research group. It's a long shot, but we're on it." he explained, but more so to my giraffe rather than me. "So yeah... maybe I will."

"That'd be awesome." I said. "Then we'd go see dinosaurs like Professor Challenger. Giraffey would love them with the long necks. They could be friends. Please, Will."

He smiled and looked directly at me that time, "I'm on it, Jack."

That book would come to shape his entire life—for good and bad. It would become the foundation stone of his career, but also the reason for his fall from grace.

It would also be the only memento of his that I'd take with me when I'd left Riverport. I found it lying in one of the many cardboard boxes littering the floor of our barn—the place Will would use for tinkering before he'd ran out of space and moved all his projects to the warehouse he bought in the docks. The space there went cheap after the industry had gone to hell.

That's where I last saw him before I left. That's why I left.

"Will, you gotta be fucking kidding me! Tell me this is a fucking joke." I yelled at him from the door to his workshop.

"Jack, you shouldn't be here; they're watching—"

I didn't let him finish. "Who's watching? Our parents? Because I think they should totally see this. You had no right—"

He had sold our family house.

He returned the favour. "I'm sorry about the house, Jack, I really am. But they're forcing my hand here. My grant got cancelled, and this project I'm working on—"

"Who is? I don't see anyone, Will."

He hesitated. For a moment it seemed like he really was considering letting me in on what was really going on, but then he fell back on his routine. "I can't tell you." he said.

"Of course you can't. Because there's nobody, is there? No project. No them. Just you blowing off all our money on god fucking knows what. It's all in your head! Just get a grip already. Whatever it is, go see a doctor, get some goddamn meds for it."

He was starting to budge under the pressure.

"Jack, listen, you're not seeing the bigger picture. What I'm doing here—it's to save everyone. Not just you and me, maybe I can save them." he was becoming more erratic, flailing his arms, lapsing into another episode. "I just needed more money to—"

"It's drugs, isn't it?" A frustrated huff. "That's what this is about. This is new low, Will. If parents weren't rolling in their graves before, they are now."

He cracked. "Well, I'm not the one that fucking put them there, am I?" he shouted.

"What the fuck, Will?"

"It's all your fault—the accident." he screamed, then slumped to the floor, his back pressed against a desk. "If you hadn't insisted on that sleepover at Paul's, maybe they'd still be here. Maybe if mum hadn't been driving that day, they'd still be alive. If they hadn't gone to pick you up maybe they wouldn't be dead!"

I remember I stood there, stupefied, as numb as Will had seemed at the funeral. Was that what he was thinking at the time? That I had killed them? Or was it just something he blurted out just then, at the spur of the moment, when I had triggered an outpour of the bundled up emotions he didn't know how to express? Since then, I have found out it had been the latter.

"You gotta be kidding me." I said. "You can't be fucking serious. You ungrateful prick! You—fucking—husk of a human being."That was the closest comparison I could come up with. "I've been working three jobs a week these past eight years to keep us afloat. I almost dropped out because of you. I flunked school so that you could stay in your little rabbit hole, and you have the guts to say this shit to my face? What the fuck's wrong with you?"

Huddled in the corner, he pressed his hands to his temples, rocking his body against the desk behind him. "Just fuck off, all right?" he whispered. "Just go."

I knew he was in pain. His brain was on fire with all the synapses overloading the receptors that usually stayed dormant. I hated seeing him like this. But he had gone too far. I wasn't going to offer sympathy.

"That's it." I said in the firmest voice I could muster. "I'm getting out of here. I'm leaving this town. I won't be coming back. Goodbye, Will."

That stirred him into making some feeble attempt at stopping me. I heard him call out: "Jack, stop!" But by then, I'd already gotten on my motorbike and was riding the hell out of the docks.

I planned to make good on my word.

I got out of Riverport in a hurry, bought a ticket to the remotest place I could think of. Changed my number. I hadn't even heard of Will for years until that one phone-call from Alison.

"I can't believe you're really marrying that jerk." I told her over the phone.

She was in the midst of planning her wedding. Her husband-to-be was a coach for the Riverport Rexes, a.k.a. my ex gym teacher. A total jerk in all the areas imaginable, as gym teachers go. She could do so much better.

"He's the only guy that ever showed an interest." she said. "I'm over thirty, Jack. It's not like I have a lot of options."

"Yeah, well, any option is better than this."

I could hear her sigh on the other end. "You know how much time I invested in the other option, Jack. Now I just want some certainty that it will pay off—and family. The next opportunity may never come. I can't afford chasing ghosts anymore. Just sad that you won't be here for the wedding."

"You know I couldn't hand you over to that asshole with a clean conscience."

She laughed, "Is that why you had to run and hide all the way in Thailand? Clean conscience?"

"The food is good," I retorted, but of course she was right. It wasn't tourism that drove me there.

"Speaking of ghosts... Will called; he wants to get in touch. I gave him your number."

"Well, you shouldn't have. It's not like I'm gonna pick up anyway."

"Jack," There was the sigh again. "He seems to want to make amends. It really looks like he's turning his life around this time. He started working again, even published a couple of articles. Peer reviews haven't been exactly favourable, but it's a start. I think he's finally coming back to the real world."

"Well, it's too late for that."

"I'm just saying the opportunity is there if you want to make use of it."

I never did, of course. But Alison was right about Will—he called at length, left voice messages. And I would automatically delete them without having listened to them first. I was as unforgiving as he was oblivious. I loved him, but tough love seemed like a mild expression for it.

He was part of the life I was running from. The life I was unable to cope with. The past filled with premature responsibility, abandonment, long work hours, poor life choices, juvenile delinquency. I had a good thing going in Thailand, wandering from place to place, enjoying the freedom of not having to worry about a thing. I left Riverport with a childish vision of becoming something akin to Nathan Drake—a swashbuckling adventurer chasing after forgotten treasure. I ended up making ends meet as a freelance reporter and tour guide for hire. I'd occasionally take a mercenary odd job for a local crime lord if the funds went dry. It was an easy life, comfortable—unlike the one I left behind.

But this story is not about me. If it were up to me, I'd have never come back.

But I was to return and give shape to Will's nightmares.


	3. Beth

She loved him—Beth could see it in the woman's eyes, the way she rushed to help him. The wound, however much it had bled, was not life-threatening; Beth could see that—they both did. She was trained, Beth could tell as much. She could not guess just to what extent, but the methodical way she went through the individual steps even as her hands were shaking betrayed some rudimentary medical skills.

Beth shifted her attention to the man contorting in pain. In all her years preparing for the Fracture, she'd never seen him up close. William Joyce. The instigator of it all. He wasn't conventionally attractive—not like his brother—but Beth suspected that wasn't why Alison was interested in him.

"We should get you to the hospital." she said.

"No, I'll be fine. I need to start working—"

"I'm not asking your permission, Will. You need a doctor."

Beth liked her attitude.

"You." she turned to Beth. "You're coming with."

Maybe Beth was too quick to jump to that conclusion.

She squirmed. For the moment she'd be safe in the open. She knew it was going to take him a while to recuperate, to make up his mind about it. She was safe until then. The day Monarch Solutions would be founded was the day the hunt would begin in earnest.

Still, it was best not to draw attention. Very few scenarios drew more attention than showing up in a hospital with a gunshot wound patient.

"I don't think that's a good idea."

"But I do." Alison retorted. "Will had just finished a groundbreaking project. Then you show up; and the next thing I know he's shot. A little quaint, don't you think?"

"I know it looks bad." Beth admitted.

_But that's not what had happened._

She had rushed after him into the machine, making it inside in the last possible moment. The door shut behind her. Her opponent wasted no time, running along the corridor, the echoes of other travellers erupting around him. She hurried after him, into the spacious room dimly lit with floodlights and computer screens.

"Stop!" she shouted.

A muzzle flash. A groan. The uncushioned sound of a body hitting the ground. Wet drops on the floor. A sucked in breath.

She pulled the trigger of her gun, its muzzle pointing at the figure fast-forwarding through the narrow space between the technology-laden desks. On the opposite side of the warehouse the door had slammed open. He was gone.

She failed to stop him. Again. The inevitability of the course of fate began to dawn on her. It was all enfolding the way it was meant to. Her will had no bearing on the results. Her resolve was starting to crack. The questions arose. Was she setting herself up to fail?

She leaned over him, the huddling figure on the ground, touched him lightly. He panicked, squirming, rolling over, kicking the air frantically.

"Don't shoot!" he repeated three times like an incantation.

"Hey, it's okay." she dropped the gun. "I'm on your side."

"Who are you?"

"I'm Beth Wilder. There's some things you need to know."

Then another voice bounced off the walls, resonant upon the metallic surfaces, hurrying towards them.

"Will? What the hell happened? And who are you?"

Alison Cunningham. William's attorney. Friend. The closest person he had after Jack.

"I better fetch the first-aid kit."

She navigated the place as if she'd spend a lot of time in there. She oozed determination and certainty even under pressure. Later Beth would find out that she took care of almost anything and everything William needed. Grants, orders, transactions, letters, bills... She organised his life professionally—and directly, if needed. Brought him food; did his laundry. And for a good reason—William was as disorganised as geniuses come.

She would often catch him say: "Alison used to do this." and "Alison always took care of that." Anytime he forgot or misplaced something, he'd mutter: "Alison would know."

He needed her. She needed someone to need her. They would make the oddest couple.

"William, I know it's a lot to take in, but you have to listen to me." she said. Beth knew what would come next—that she was effectively putting an end to any semblance of a normal life he's had until now. His career. Reputation as a scientist. Relationship with Jack. But the future has forced her hand. "The Fracture—it's going to happen. You're the only one that can stop it."

"There's no theoretical groundwork. It could take... even years to build."

"And it will." she nodded. "You'll have to keep it a secret. Even from the ones you love." Her gaze trailed towards the door where one of them had disappeared moments ago. "It's the only way to keep them safe."

He closed his eyes, quickly coming to realisation of just what that entailed. "They won't understand." he said.

"No, they won't." Beth nodded.

As predicted the medical staff was up in arms about their latest arrival. The doctors were playing twenty questions with William and Alison. Beth couldn't help but nervously look about and scan the strangers surrounding her. She knew it was virtually impossible for Monarch to trail her at this point—a month before its inception—but she had honed her paranoia her whole life. It has served her well.

She missed Jack. She had learnt to rely on his reckless optimism to steer her. She had to remind herself that he was currently about thirteen years old.

"It's a standard procedure, ma'am." the doctor said, his voice stern. Beth shifted her attention to the conversation.

"I have a law degree; I know what the procedures are. And I'm telling you alerting the police isn't necessary—"

"Rules are rules, ma'am. And we cannot bend them just because you asked nicely—which, for the record, you did not." the doctor insisted. "Either way, we're obligated _by law _to report any gunshot wounds to the local authorities."

"My client is in shock and requires the best treatment and privacy."

"Ma'am, your client has been shot at."

"It was purely accidental. And my client does not wish that it be known that—"

"I tried to kill myself." Will said abruptly.

Alison went with it, "Well, that."

He continued. His voice was measured, decisive—so unlike the Will Beth would come to know. "I was performing an experiment in my workshop at the docks and it didn't pan out. I was about to become the laughing stock of the scientific community. I lost it. I wanted to shoot myself. But my grip slipped and the bullet ended up in my shoulder instead."

"If you alert the police, newspapers will be all over it." Alison added. "It'll be the end of his career. Please."

They did not rehearse it; didn't prepare the story beforehand. It was all Will. Beth couldn't help but wonder just how removed from truth parts of that story were.

The doctor required no other explanation. The cops never got the word.

They sat together in the waiting room while the doctors treated Will. The silence between them was heavy, charged with mistrust and rivalry. Beth wished she could say something—anything—to put Alison at ease without putting lives, and the future, at jeopardy. She felt bad for her—Alison would experience the worst possible type of ghosting... was ghosting even a thing in 1999?

"That was quick thinking on Will's part." Beth said.

"No thanks to you. You got him into this mess." she retorted.

The venom was understandable. For all Alison knew, the bullet wedged in Will's shoulder could've well been hers. And he was hurt _because_ of her, if not by her. Beth wasn't going to let herself be snarked at, however.

"Technically, he got me—and everyone else—in this mess by constructing a time machine."

_If only you knew the true extent of that mess._

"I don't care. I don't trust you. Stay away from him."

This protectiveness—Beth would soon find herself experiencing the same thing. Will had that effect on people.

Beth shrugged, "No can do."

The doctor returned to interfere with their catfight just in time. The bullet did not damage anything important. He would just find it difficult to use his right arm while the wound healed. In fact, he strongly discouraged that the arm be moved at all for the time being. He praised Alison for the quick treating of the wound. She mouthed a thank you in response.

"Overall, he's going to be okay." the doctor continued. "Now, we'd like to keep him here for a couple of days for monitoring. And I strongly recommend he sees a therapist about his... problem."

"Noted." she said.

"You can go see him, if you'd like."

Alison didn't hesitate for a moment; the doctor showed her to William's room. Beth followed, watching from afar. Something she was exceptionally good at.

"Hey, Einstein." she said softly. "Don't give me a scare like that again, okay?"

"When can I go? There's a project I need to start working on. I shouldn't be here."

He was back to business. The present slipped past him. Distracted by the thoughts rushing ahead in his mind; he needed to give them direction or mute them with his _herbal remedies_, as he called them. That was the William Beth would come to know.

"Out of the question. You need to rest." she insisted.

It was love. The way she looked at him, the tone of her voice. There was nothing subtle to it. Will was just blind. Oblivious, but not entirely unreceptive. Beth noticed that when Alison bent to remove a strand of hair that had stuck to his sweaty forehead. She couldn't gauge the depth of his feelings, but she could see that there was more than Will was able to express.

"The doctor says you're still in shock." she said. "So do that big brain of yours a favour and freshen up, okay? Then we'll talk about that new project."

He tried to protest further, but the anaesthetic coursing in his veins had made him woozy. It didn't take long before his eyelids clamped shut and he dozed off. Beth watched Alison fidget on the spot for a while as she made sure he was asleep then planted a brief kiss in his hair.

Beth felt guilty. She was taking a chance away from them forever. It would take eleven years for Will to finish building the Countermeasure. For eleven long, lonely years, it would consume him. She knew only too well how devastating that isolation was—she had lived it since she was eight years old. Seventeen years she had been preparing for the Fracture. She started no relationships that she wouldn't be able to discard at a moment's notice.

Now she was setting him on the same life-altering path.

The knowledge of the future was a cross that she would have to bear alone. The only things he wanted to know were related to his work—the Fracture, its onset and after-effects, how to stop it. Beth wished she could unload, confine in somebody about the horrors she's seen. But she respected his decision. He didn't want to feel like a puppet dancing to a predetermined tune. So long as he didn't know the details, he could cope with the inevitability of fate. Beth wished she had that option.

"I couldn't live like that, Beth." he had said.

"I get it, Will, I do."

Now he was poring over research papers and calculations awkwardly scratched onto a blackboard in his non-dominant hand, his handwriting even less legible than usual. His other arm was resting in a triangular dressing, immobilising it as much as possible. But anytime he'd manage to move it by accident, he would instantly erupt into a storm of hissing and vulgarisms.

"Fucking shit, goddamnit. Well, I have bad news for you." he concluded at last. "According to my calculations... the amount of chronon particles needed for the jump, the time it would take to source them..." he took a deep breath, organising the scattered thoughts into a coherent sentence. "In short, sending you that far to the future is impossible without a significant scientific breakthrough."

"So what you're saying I'm stuck here." she sighed.

He gave her a sad nod, "Essentially, yes." Beth's face dropped. He continued, "I was already looking into the ways of increasing the efficiency of chronon harvesting, but as you can see I'm on a budget. I was hoping the time machine patent could pay for that, but guess that's out of the picture now. Shit."

"Yeah." she breathed out, eyes fixated on the nearest wall. "You can say that again."

"I want to help." he assured her. "But I don't have the resources, or the technology. The research would take years. It's either one or the other. And given the circumstances—"

"Just focus on the Countermeasure," she said. "That's the only thing that matters. I can't go back empty-handed."

What came next was wholly unexpected—empathy, from the most emotionally awkward person she knew.

"Beth, I... umm ... you gonna be okay?" he asked.

"Yeah, it's just... I have an appointment to keep." she said. "And it looks like I'll be traversing time the old fashioned way. One day at the time."

That meant waiting eleven years for Jack's arrival. She'd be coming on forty then. He wouldn't have aged a day. For him, it would be a matter of minutes.

The only one who was going through a comparable experience was her mortal enemy. They were bound to each other through events that she hoped no one else would have to witness. The End of Time. She dreams of it—the world trapped in the zero state. Each angle presented a different reality—timelines crashing into each other, buildings demolished from one point of view, but being built from another. Paths crumbling and overgrowing underfoot. Weather frozen in place playing tricks in the worst April fashion. The light both absent and present in mismatched patches of sky. In the middle of it all—people, neither alive nor dead, frozen in the moment.

In the worst of her nightmares, Jack is there too, immobilised in the eternity that ceased to exist. She cannot help him.

Just before she startles awake comes the howling.

She shook her head, grounding herself in the present. "Hey, Will?" she called out. "Theoretically speaking, if the Fracture would run its course and the world would reach permanent zero state, then...?"

"Then it would mean that we had failed." Will said. "Why?"

_Shit._

"Just wondering."

She saw it. The implication weighed heavily on her mind. If she was able to witness it then it had as good as happened. Later that day, she would recollect to her tape recorder:

_Ever since I was eight years old, I saw proof that things happened for a reason. That they can't be changed, that I had a purpose. I... don't know what to believe now. If what I saw was real, then anything we do to stop it... will fail. If that's true, then what is this all for? What does it mean?_

_I can't give up, I'm gonna complete the cycle. Find a solution. There's still hope. I have to believe that._

First things first, she would have to convince Will to move the time machine to Bradbury Swimming Pool—the place she knew Monarch wouldn't track it to until 2016. Then she had to make sure to start her kid self in on her mission.

She opened the notebook and began writing:

_Beth,_

_I know that this encounter will be a lot to take in. After all, it's not every day you meet your future self. I'd tell you that you need to keep this all a secret, but I know you won't listen. You'll learn that lesson the hard way._

_The next few years won't be easy for you. Nobody you know is ever going to understand what you are going through. Those closest to you will try to change you, convince you that you are losing your mind. You're not. You are special. You have been chosen to do something amazing. Know that your struggles will all be worth it in the end because you have a purpose._

_You're going to save the world._

On her way to the workshop she runs into Alison. She glares at her same as she did during their first encounter. Beth knew the emotion—jealousy. She wished she could give her a clarification, but knew her words would fall flat—not without the explanation of everything else that was going on.

Grudgingly, the two of them have developed a routine. Denied access to the workshop, Alison would hand over her stuff to Beth who in turn would bring it to Will. Anything from legal papers to food and laundry. She was a natural caretaker. This would go on for years.

Beth quickly skims through the contents of the folder she gave her. Bradbury Swimming Pool deed and all the relevant documentation, all neatly clipped together for convenience. Attached is a typed up letter, signed in her own hand; Beth stops in her tracks and takes a moment to read it. She had used her "job voice" throughout. Beth could almost imagine the way her hands shook as they hovered over the keyboard, searching her vocabulary for the least emotionally charged words available. The amount of self-restraint it took to write it. She felt the same scribbling away in the notebook meant for her kid self.

When she finally enters the workshop, Will is charting a possible design on a blackboard. The chalk screeches on the surface, clumsily held between the fingers of a hand unaccustomed to writing. He talks to himself, but his voice blends into the backdrop of old school heavy metal music. The smell of pot is in the air.

She places the folder on the closest table, far away from the busy coffee machine. Will had a custom of spilling it. She smiles—he has placed a framed photograph on the desk, of his parents and Jack—to remind himself of what was at stake. Propped against the frame is another, folded and dog-eared as if somebody had been carrying it in their wallet for some time, the ink cracked down the middle. He was wearing a tuxedo that on him looked uncomfortably formal, and leaning on his shoulder was a beaming woman, a few years older than him, looking beautiful in her evening wear. They were standing outside the Riverport University Library; the banner above was announcing the Riverport University Annual Ball. He looked out of his element, but the happiest Beth had ever seen him.

Beth was sad that she would never see their relationship come to fruition. The universe had made Alison a widow before they'd ever start dating.

In the present day—October 10, 2016—William Joyce was dead.


	4. Paul

Paul had always admired him. There was an ambivalent magnetism about William Joyce. The way he was simultaneously the smartest person in the room and the most obtuse, depending on the area of intelligence considered. Paul would eventually come to discover his own brand of smarts as he grew up, but he would always envy the creativity of those that he did the marketing for.

Growing up, Paul had cultivated a peculiar fondness for William Joyce. Perhaps that's why he cannot bring himself to kill him even as the muzzle of his gun is pointed at his frontal lobe. He's hesitating, just as he did back in 1999 in his workshop.

He observes relativity of time first-hand when the childhood adventures on the Joyce farm flash before his eyes. The dinners during which William would discuss his work with the Joyces, the sleepover nights when all three of them—him, Jack and William would watch TV together late at night until early morning.

The agitated lectures Will would lead about the danger of his work in the barn, declaring it off limits for his and Jack's play. Overloud metal music supposed to keep people out and the sounds of his experiments in. The scene which followed when ultimately he and Jack trespassed on William's _playground_, as they called it, and messed with his instruments. He remembers the spasm of uncontrollable rage that in the end only Alison would manage to calm down. William had uttered every vulgarism known to man, and some of his own invention too. Then, when that storm had passed, she would yell them down herself, reiterating many of William's points. She was one of the chosen few allowed in the barn, along with William's research associates. It would be Will and Alison that would eventually take Paul and Jack to their first concert—Stonecrow, an Old Gods of Asgard cover band. It had become his favourite. One of the reasons him and Jack would later start a band of their own.

He remembers the impatience, the erratic fidgeting and various nervous ticks that any attempt at tutoring Jack and Paul in mathematics and physics would bring out in Will each time. The prolonged exhales when Jack and Paul took his lessons less than seriously. They would prank him and then cackle at his denial of amusement.

He recalls his fondness of brownies that he always refused to share, claiming they're _medicinal_. "This is no kid stuff." he had told them. Afterwards, he'd take to hiding them. He and Jack had never found his secret stash, though not for the lack of trying.

He recalls, too, the sense of impending doom in William's eyes when he arrived to the Riverport University lab a lifetime ago, only to see the experiment that was to destroy the world already underway despite the fervent soothsaying, which drove Paul to that level of desperation in the first place.

The grip on his gun tightens.

Killing had never come naturally to him. It was the necessity of circumstance that drove him to murder. Firstly, _them_. The shifting spectres he encountered at the End of Time, pursuing him from the moment he stepped out of the machine, hunting him down.

Secondly, _her_.

_I still see visions of it. Everyday, haunting me. Time frozen, billions of people just stopped for an eternity. Never living and never dead. She followed me here, tried to kill me. I'd like to think it haunts her too._

She hunted him across the timelines, determined to see him dead. He didn't understand then, innocent in spite of all his faults. He had not yet lived long enough to see himself become the monster that drove her hand. It was her adamancy that with time eroded his kindlier traits.

_We create our own demons, _he once read—or was that something he heard on TV?

The irony of that statement took on circular proportions in this case. They created each other.

_Sometimes the world doesn't need another hero, it needs a monster. _Another thing he had heard somewhere.

And yet, as he stares into the scared blue of William Joyce's eyes, he cannot bring himself to pull the trigger. Within his eyes is mirrored his own discarded idealism. Hope. In the face of scientific evidence to the contrary, William Joyce held onto hope.

Hope. An incredible driving force, yet more powerful a source of disappointment. Something to lose every time fate would wrench control from him.

"Paul? What happened to you? What are you doing?" he says.

"Only what's necessary."

"Think about this! You don't know what's at stake—"

Paul wishes he could offer him hope.

"I know exactly what's at stake! That's why I'm here!" he exclaims. "You believe you can stop what's coming. I'm giving you one chance to change your mind. This path, it's already set, it can't be changed. The past, the future... I've seen it. I've lived it. For seventeen years." His voice is weary, mirroring in its tone every wrinkle marring his face.

Seventeen years. Time aplenty to change the course of events, one would think. But the reality was daunting.

Paul's grandfather was a Calvinist—Paul had always been afraid of the man. Now he found himself thinking along much the same wavelength.

He was caught in a loop of action and consequence in which his choices did not matter. His role had already been given. Like you were born a sinner or a saint. Of course, his grandfather had seen himself as the latter, even as he drank and beat his wife he still believed he'd been destined for heaven.

Paul had found the truth of that teaching in his every step taken to prevent the occurrence of the Fracture. He'd discover that free will was an illusion as his every choice led to the pre-set chain of events. The path to heaven or hell had already been laid out to him, regardless of the choices he would make.

His earliest choice ended killing his best friend's parents.

December 22nd, 1999.

It had been one of Paul's first attempts at mastering destiny. The desperate hope that if a single change was possible then perhaps what he had seen was not inevitable. That the course of events could be changed. If he could achieve that much then maybe he could reason with William, get him involved in his plan. With his help, maybe he could stop the Fracture from ever occurring. Or perhaps develop a means to stop it. He was nothing if not opportunist.

He drove to the farm late in the morning to watch out for their departure. He would save them, he told himself. He had read every newspaper article detailing the accident, the particulars still etched in his memory. Even so, he didn't have much of a plan, merely a compulsion to do _something_.

As ever while waiting, time dragged on at a snail's pace.

At last, shortly after the bells toils noon, the Joyces emerge from the house that he considered the lesser half of his childhood home. He is struck by how familiar the faces still are, seventeen years later. Kathryn and Anthony Joyce exchange a few words and laughs as Anthony hands his wife the car keys. A Christmas in its own right. The rare occasion that Kathryn decides to drive.

The engine whirs into life, the car reversing slowly down the driveway onto the street. Paul starts his own, driving ahead, determined to block the path of whichever vehicle the Joyces were to collide with. They would survive this day.

Then _she_ is there and all rationality boils away.

He had spent months looking for her; he wasn't going to let her get away now. He stepped on the gas, car propelling itself across the road towards her, blind to everything else. At the same time, Kathryn Joyce panics behind the wheel when a car suddenly blocks the road. Slamming the brakes violently, she swerves her car to the side, grazing Paul's and crashing front first into a nearby utility pole.

They were both dead instantly. Their faces splattered against the windshield, shattered bits of glass penetrating their skulls. Nobody could hope to survive that.

He loses track of the redhead momentarily and then she is gone. Was she just a figment of his imagination? Like the distorted creatures haunting his sleep?

_I killed them._

He ponders the irony for a few passing moments, then turns his car around and speeds away.

It was him all along. He had killed Jack's parents. In the dimness of the derelict apartment he's renting, overlooking the docks, the full horror of the realisation comes to him. His striving to change the past had only led to its occurrence. It was his car that had caused the car crash.

His future actions had already been accounted for in the past. The Novikov self-consistency principle. A self-fulfilling prophecy.

His brain triggers an appropriate memory to replay to add to his self-flagellation.

"Just imagine the possibilities if we can put it to practice, Will!" he had told him, a few weeks before the Fracture. He was a different man then. The universe had not yet shown him the error of his convictions. "We could warn people about disasters before they happen. Cure diseases before they spread. We could prevent wars. Stop people from dying. Imagine the millions of lives we could save if we just sent someone back through time to kill Hitler."

Will shook his head, "Except that's not how it works." Paul's shoulders sagged. He had lost him; worse—William had never given him a chance. He paced the room as he gave a rambling explanation. "Time is a closed loop. Any attempt to change things was always part of the chain of events in the first place. You would change nothing. It's already happened. Novikov self-consistency principle."

Paul's expression made it clear that he did not follow. He had never inquired into the science behind the project. William took this as a cue to go on.

"An example," Will said. "Picture an egg."

"Why an egg?" Paul asked quizzically.

"Just picture it." he barked impatiently. "An egg is sitting on the table. You leave the room, come back, and the egg is broken on the floor. You aren't sure how this happened but it saddens you. The egg was important to you because... I don't really know, reasons. So, you travel to the past to prevent the egg from breaking. When you arrive in the past you rush over to the table, accidentally knock it over, the egg falls and breaks. Congratulations. You caused the very thing you tried to prevent. Closed loops."

It was him that pleaded back then, "I need you on this, Will. You understand this stuff better than anyone. The project needs that expertise." He didn't mention that the only other option was to surrender the project to a shady multimillion dollar corporation; as of yet unaware that the very corporation he was fighting against he would come to establish as his _evil future self_.

"That is why should listen to me." Will insisted, fidgeting with a pencil in his fingers. "Listen. I took a look at your schematics. You need to make adjustments. The mainframe design is faulty—it lacks a failsafe that would stabilise the core when things go south. If the calculations are off—"

"The machine works." Paul retorted. "The test runs have all been successful. There's no need—"

"Paul, you're not listening. I'm telling you—"

"We don't have the budget, Will!" he shouted. "We can't afford to make any changes this late into development. The investors—"

Will pinched the bridge of his nose and rolled his eyes in his usual irate fashion. "Shut up, Paul! Jesus Christ, just shut up." he yelled. "You wanted my expertise, so listen. Keep your mouth shut for a minute and acknowledge the words coming out of mine, okay. This isn't a fucking microwave you're messing with, Paul. For fuck's sake, this is a micro black hole we're talking about; its bigger sisters in space can swallow galaxies." He looked Paul in the eye to emphasise the seriousness of his statement. Eye contact didn't come easy to him, Paul knew. "The machine has design flaws. And my scientific expertise says that if you fire up this hunk of junk, it's gonna blow." A trickle of sweat ran down his brow, drenched strands of hair plastered to his forehead. He looked delirious. The pencil he'd been fiddling with snapped in half in his hand. Paul stared at him as if he were crazy.

Paul's voice sounded dejected when he spoke, but even so, he wouldn't back down, "Based on what evidence?"

"I just know." he said, offering no explanation.

Paul sighed. "This is crazy, Will." he said, growing agitated. "I can't have a team of leading experts in the field undo years of their work based on a gut feeling. This isn't like your tinkering in the barn, we're on schedule here. The people pouring money into this project want to see results and they want them yesterday."

"Paul," he interrupted him. "Listen to yourself. If you had a team of leading experts in the field, you wouldn't be here asking me to hold their hands. You're desperate. At least admit that."

Paul grudgingly nodded his head. Will was right, he was out of options. William was as brilliant as no one else Paul knew, but he was unstable—he was no one's first pick as the project lead; he was simply the last qualified person left.

"Look, Paul, you're my brother's friend—and to an extent, mine." Will continued. "But I can't put my name on this with a clean conscience. I'm sorry. This is a shitstorm of massive proportions waiting to happen. And if it does—" he took a deep breath, running his hand through his hair. "Just... don't, please. This is something you guys should leave well enough alone."

Will had repeated that same tantrum at the next investor meeting, effectively putting the project to a halt. Paul tested the machine himself out of equal measure hubris and desperation. As predicted, it blew up.

If only he had listened to Will. On either occasion.

After that he doesn't try intervening with fate again, apart from the incident of 9/11. The other occasion he'd fail himself—and the world—yet again.

_September 11, 2001._

_It happened for the second time. I watched the planes hit, I watched the towers fall. I did everything I could to prevent it, took every precaution. I warned them, time and again. And just like every other thing I've tried to change, I failed._

_It can't be done. I'm living in a cycle that cannot be broken. And I know where it leads. I thought I could prevent the End of Time. I can't. But, I can use this power to survive it. To ensure that, when time ends, life doesn't._

_I'm refocusing Monarch's efforts. We'll develop technology to counter the effects of the Fracture. We'll develop weapons to fight back against the enemies that will thrive there._

And now, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, an expert in the field pleads with him: "This is madness! There's no harm in trying."

Paul's vision floods with blood. His perception narrows to a single memory. Kathryn and Anthony Joyce, their face reduced to gore smeared on shattered windshield, human bodies contorted in the wreck of the car, its body wrapped around the utility post. The carnage that he had caused.

"There is," he objects. "That's why I can't risk you opposing me, Will. It doesn't have to end like this."

Will stares deep into Paul's unflinching, cold eyes, overcoming his fear of direct eye contact.

"We can't just let this happen. I'll never stop trying."

William's hope seeds doubt in Paul. A scientist resolved to defy the rules of the universe. The rules he helped discover. His conviction wavers momentarily.

"I'm not wrong." he had told Beth Wilder before he put a bullet through her head on July 4th, 2010. By then he had come to terms with what his purpose entailed. Rationalised it.

But he can't take the weight of his best friend's brother's death. A man he grew up beside.

"It took me years to come to terms with what must be done. But we don't have years."

He lowers the gun.

Instead, he taps his earpiece lightly and says: "Trigger."

Let someone else shoulder it.

"I never wanted this."

Paul Serene dashes forward, propelled by his powers. From this point onward, no longer aided by the knowledge of the future but only branching visions of it, he is entering uncharted territory. Perhaps he cannot stop the Fracture, but there are still ways in which he can influence the future. The tools are in his hands.

A flash of explosion tears through the building, ripping its walls apart. The weight of the Riverport University Library comes crashing down upon William Joyce's body, crushing him beneath the rubble.


	5. Will

He uses marihuana to treat a variety of symptoms of his mental disorder. It has the power to make his thoughts singular where his mind is naturally fuzzy, helps him focus. But that day he used it to treat pain for the first time. For days he'd been swimming in morphium, not feeling a thing except the pressure of the entire universe. Now every move sent a painful jolt into his brain.

The gunshot wound in his shoulder looked worse than it had actually been; the biggest blow turned out to be to his dignity, what with all that blood his stomach was not prepared to see. It made him sick. But he was not giving the universe the satisfaction of allowing anyone witness him publicly puke his guts out. He postponed that embarrassment until after Alison got him in the hospital, if just barely. For the doctors it was just another day on the job. For him it was one of the worst days of his life.

The shoulder was making work difficult. His dominant hand was out of commission. And it was nigh impossible to stretch out to write on the blackboard with the other without accidentally moving the wounded shoulder.

He put on an Old Gods of Asgard CD and lit a joint, letting the sensations dissolve in the smoke. For a while, he merely indulged the habit of controlled and deliberate killing of the brain cells—of which he had an excess. Then he fixated himself at a blackboard adorned with his latest bout of indiscernible scribbles for what felt like an eternity, the time ticking away only in the molecules of smoke exiting his mouth. The world around him merely a backdrop for his thought processes.

He ran simulations in his head, unencumbered by other aspects of existence. As he did so, he talked to himself, the voice barely audible over the screeching guitar riffs: "The model must allow for even dispersal of chronon particles." he muttered. "Sphere? impractical. Tesseract? Not enough facets. Insufficient dispersal." He crosses out option after option, frustration surging despite the calming effects of weed.

Sometimes he wished he had more to go on than just theories and the success or failure test method. But he had refused to hear anything about the future bar the details of the Fracture. It was a small consolation to hold onto the illusion of agency rather than feel like a robot mechanically carrying out a set of pre-programmed commands. Beth seemed to understand the sentiment—envy it, even.

The task, if not urgent, came with its own set of complications. The secrecy proved to be the greatest one by far. It ruled out contact with his biggest asset.

When they first met she wore fishnets, high tops and a skirt way too short not to notice. They'd been introduced by a then girlfriend of his research associate. Will thought she was too heavy on the make-up and political agitation. But she had a brain. She challenged him. And she could be funny.

Before long she ceased to be the opinionated chick that tried too hard to make him more extroverted than he could bear to be. He'd be bouncing ideas off her during lunch break; somehow she knew just the right set of questions to ask to spur him towards a solution whenever his own intellect came short. She gave him impulse.

In return, he would listen to her rave about the latest political cause she was interested in and nod along—for lack of knowing how else to display engagement. At times his consciousness would waver and then she would kick him under the table to root him back in reality.

But it was the evenings she'd be babysitting Jack that he enjoyed the most. She'd leave all her edge in the university halls, forgo her contacts for glasses, wear a simple t-shirt and slacks, her hair in a messy ponytail. She'd occupy Jack while he worked, and after midnight they'd watch slasher horrors together.

He missed her.

He couldn't define his emotions and sort them neatly into labelled boxes like others could, but that was hardly synonymous with lacking them altogether as many people had assumed. He was a reader—he had read about emotions, formed prototypes in each category. He understood rage, grief, frustration, contentment, humour, physical desire—there were entire databases of that, but love still puzzled him. He had read Shakespeare's sonnets, seen an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. The characters always seemed ready to lay down their lives for each other. But he had lived through moments when he had wished to die without the involvement of a human being he'd be emotionally attached to. Love—in its classical, most clichéd sense—confused him. How could lack of will to live represent devotion to one another? Why would anyone wish that upon their loved ones? How was that in any way rational?

But he _felt_, contrary to the popular belief. He wished to wield his emotions as visibly and deftly as artists could. As it was, he was unable to formulate a better definition of his feelings than the lame observation that he liked having her around—as opposed to the remaining 99% of world's population. And that he'd rather tinker in his barn and watch slasher horrors with her than feel the weight of the universe on his shoulders.

Instead, he was forced to devise a cure for the space-time continuum and make small talk with a woman he barely knew.

"So what's the plan?" he said. After a moment of pondering his vagueness, he decided to add, helpfully: "For you know what."

"The current plan is," Beth mumbled in between of chewing on her bagel. "You'll build the device while I play a sitting duck and wait for my partner to show up... for eleven years. I think that's plan D or E already."

Will paused and glanced at Beth over his shoulder, "Partner?"

She chuckled, "I figured _the guy I'm trying to save the world with _would be a bit of a mouthful."

Will was apprehensive. "I hope he's dependable."

She paused to finish chewing the last morsel and then washed it down with some Coke. "He's... personally invested." she sighed sadly. "He was supposed to take the trip with me. But something went wrong... I arrived at a different time than I was supposed to. And now I'm here—for the next eleven years or so."

Her sigh dissolved in the music.

Hers was a brand of silence Will was not comfortable with. The air in the workshop hung heavy with her anticipation. The very molecules charged with the pressure to reciprocate. She was exaggerating the social cues for his benefit. Against his usual instincts, he decided to indulge her.

"Okay, I'll bite. Sounds like you have something to tell."

Her gaze briefly turned to the notebook in her lap that she'd been thumbing. "I've been preparing for this since I was eight years old. Kept everyone at an arm's length. Then this guy shows up with his killer smile, daredevil attitude and sarcasm as a coping mechanism. And we share the same goal. For once I can confide in somebody without coming off as a total nutjob. We just clicked. I thought that once this crisis was over, I could finally have something good." she sighed again. "Anyway, that's gone now. Right now he's out there somewhere, living out his early teens. It's so weird to think about."

"You could still make it work." Will shrugged from in front of the blackboard, instantly regretting the gesture as a jolt of pain reminded him of the still mending wound. _Shit._

Beth chuckled bitterly, "Four thousand one hundred forty-five days, Will. I doubt any single person is worth that." then, as an afterthought, "The world just might, though."

He decided to surrender to social interaction after all, making his way to the coffee machine, pouring himself a Night Springs-themed dose of caffeine. He sat down on the floor next to Beth, swirling cold coffee around his mug, and lit another joint, letting the thoughts clamouring for his attention, screaming from various crevices of his brain, be muted by the drug.

"What about you?" she asked.

He was taken aback, "My bonds are mostly biologically determined. My brother, my parents... Then maybe some professional kinship with my old research team."

"What about _her_?" she helpfully nodded towards the photo propped up on the nearby table, positioned as if to be glanced at each time he would pass it on his way to get coffee. And he did drink copious amounts of it.

"Alison?" he pondered the question briefly. "We're _friends_, I think."

Beth shook her head, disagreeing, "You've been carrying that picture in your wallet for what—two years now?" she guessed. "Certainly looks as if you've been thumbing it an awful lot. Have you never thought of acting on your feelings?"

"I don't know what I feel." he said.

Physics came as easy to him as breathing; organic chemistry and biology, however, did not—and what are emotions but interwoven collections of chemical and neural impulses... He was wired wrong, and nobody was more aware of the fact. He was living with that frustration every day.

Just then Beth said: "Most of us don't, Will. Until we do."

"Tell me," he began, taking a sip of the cold coffee to wash away the dryness in his mouth, to make the words come out smoother. "Fourteen years from now, in 2016, is there any hint that we are together?"

She hung her head low, breathing out a solemn, "No."

"Then you already know that I won't do anything." he said. Then, as an afterthought, "She can do better than me."

"Really?" she cocked her head with a certain amusement. "Better than one of the smartest guys in the world?"

"I mean she deserves someone... emotionally present."

She nodded in something akin to understanding.

He made as if to pass her the joint, but she refused it with a shake of her head. He ran a hand through his tousled hair, the joint between his nervous, fidgety fingers, dripping ash on his dirty pants.

"How will I ever explain this to them?" he asked. _If I get a chance to explain it to them at all._

She glanced at her journal, the tiny book laying in her lap that was to set the younger iteration of herself on a path that would once lead her into this moment. "You could start a journal, like I did. Put it all down. I'm told it's therapeutic. I don't know if it helps me, but guess I got over a decade to figure that out."

He took that advice to heart, recording his thoughts and history, research and personal struggles, on paper and in video logs for posterity. For them. The act became automatic, purging—even without the intended audience.

One day his brother will thumb through this journal and finally make sense of the events that have plagued their narratives—gnawing on the conscience of one, trampling the confidence of the other. But even he wouldn't get the whole picture. Words are cold ink on paper, bereft of the impulse that steered them. He would never know how he ransacked his throat for a single sob to fill the terrifying absence inside the day their parents were laid to the ground, how he tormented himself to shed a single tear. How his newly appointed role as his guardian spurred him into becoming the unlikely hero Beth had asked him to be.

He won't see his hands shake violently as he penned an entry the day he chased him away for good.

_June 7th, 2010_

_The countermeasure is near completion. I should be celebrating. I should be excited. 11 years of work is coming to an end. But there is a weight on my mind. I can't shake it off._

_Jack came to see me. He found out that I sold our parents' house to continue funding my research. Understandably, he was furious. After all, the house was left to both of us. He doesn't understand the necessity of what I'm doing here. Talking turned to yelling. Yelling turned to pushing. He told me it wasn't mine to sell. He told me they were his parents too. He told me that I was a piece of shit._

_I was angry. I couldn't contain myself. And then I said it. I still don't believe the words came out of my mouth._

_I told him that it was his fault. The car crash. I told him that he was to blame for everything we'd been through. I knew it was the one thing that could truly hurt him. And I used it._

_I can justify my actions as a result of months of fatigue, frustration, lack of sleep. It was wrong. I knew it as soon as I said it. He just stood there, devastated, for what felt like minutes. I could see a wall building between us._

_He told me he's leaving this town. He's never coming back._

_That was three days ago. I haven't been able to reach him since._

_I can't sleep. I can't eat. I can't concentrate. I know the countermeasure will be finished soon, but that victory is a hollow one now._

_I've spent 11 years building a device to save the world. The only thing that kept me going all this time was the fact that there was one person in this world that I needed to protect, no matter what the cost._

_I just lost him._

That day began the loneliest period of his life. They have all given up on him, as all eventually did. Jack gone. His best friend—his _only_ friend—also gone. Even Beth had vanished not long after putting him on this path of absolute isolation.

He tried focusing on that last modicum of purpose he had left—his work. But once the Countermeasure was finished, it had gone, too. His life's purpose for the past eleven years undone. Stolen. The site of his workshop a flashing disaster zone of clashing timelines—merely a taste of the catastrophe yet to come. He watched a stray cat disappear into the shifting flickers of past, present and possibility, never to re-emerge.

It took him several hours of thorough panic and an old hazmat suit to compose himself enough to venture into the ground zero and recover remnants of his research. He held onto a table for stability as time bled all around him, coming in bursts of daylight and darkness and abrupt turns of weather. Echoes of the days past. He observed himself slouch over a tableful of documents in the most literal out of body experience possible. Watched as his past self slammed a fist on the table board and a coffee mug tipped over, the dark liquid staining the papers. The blackboard filled and erased itself on a whim. Metal music blared out, reversed and ceased in a cacophony that soon gave him a migraine. The wall that once separated his workshop and the adjacent warehouse glitched between various stages of being knocked down. Furniture disappeared or rearranged itself. The table dissolved under his weight, he staggered momentarily. This was but an isolated pocket of what the Fracture would look like.

After a moment, he started recognising the recurring patterns of the entangled timelines, discerning individual threads. He spied Alison entering the workshop sometime in the dead of winter late at night. Instinctively, he reached out, starved for her presence—for any human presence at all. He heard his own voice begging for his research grant to be extended. They had hung up on him. Desperation had driven him to sell their parents' farmhouse, to cover the costs of the last stages of the project. It had cost him Jack. His stormy silhouette enters the workshop as on cue, the aberration stops him mid-motion, inside the twitching figure of Alison, the two forming a curious sort of Gemini. Then, as if by irony, Beth's voice rises above the commotion, warning him of the consequences of his experiments.

Through the centre of the space-time oddity, he made his way towards the room in which he kept the safe that used to house the Countermeasure. The door flew open on his approach and shut itself behind him, locking him in. The safe was empty. A breath hitched in his throat. From a drawer of a nearby desk he managed to fish out a measuring device and turned the button. The device elicited a telling high-pitched squeal.

"Chronon hypersaturation." he gasped. "No, that can't be right." He continued fiddling with the controls for several cycles of dawn and sundown and their reverse until he admitted the fatality. The Countermeasure's casing had been opened. It had to have been. The site stored nothing else potent enough to cause the anomaly. "Fuck."

He swept what documents he could into a cardboard box, suddenly determined to get out of there. He stopped but for a moment, the box shaking slightly as it was held it in his vibrating arms. A photo stood propped against a picture frame; in it, his younger self sported an expression closest to happiness his limited emotive repertoire could muster, beside him a woman that had cared more than he could ever deserve. A woman that, he did not yet know, was to marry another man soon. When he picked the photo up, it started crumbling between his fingers as if the universe had been waiting with bated breath to deliver this punchline. _Everything you touch turns to dust, _it seemed to say.

He did not wait for the laugh track to come on.

It wasn't until he finally got back in his car that the vacuum of purpose set in. He couldn't figure out what was next for him, how else to fight destiny. The Countermeasure had gone, and with it the only way of saving the future that he knew of. He held out but the faintest hope that it was Beth who had claimed the device and not whoever had forced her to sever their communication and go into hiding. But for all his rationale and logic he could not shush the screeching voices of distress and fear mounting up in his mind.

His instinctual reaction—as with any problem—would be calling on Alison. And for the first time in years he toyed with the idea of confiding in her, laying bare all the secrets weighing his psyche. But then he remembered the pervasive sensation of being watched, Beth's contiguous disappearance, the erratic timelines still pulsing half a mile away, and instantly any semblance of courage he might've had is quenched by paranoia. He couldn't endanger her, even if that meant his actions must remain misconstrued forever.

But if the incident reminded him of anything, it was the hunger for her presence. He was starved for a conversation, for a touch. It had gnawed on him for years, only backgrounded by the singleness of his research. He needed to see her, he needed…

_Maybe Beth was right,_ he allows himself to think. _What if…_ He never finishes the thought.

He drives to her apartment in a hurry, forgetting to stop at a red light on his way. His brain is busy processing a variety of scenarios, attempting to come up with an individualised script for each. Thankfully the roads are empty; it's a day anyone else annually celebrates.

William rings the doorbell and begins pacing about the corridor, picking on the dirt under his nails, scratching on an odd bug bite on his forearm till it's raw. The tension seems to stall the very flow of time. He knocks on the door with his fist, more urgent than a buzz of a doorbell could ever be.

Alison opens the door wearing a fuzzy bathrobe, her hair untied and dishevelled.

"Will?" she says with a hint of disbelief in her voice. "What are you doing here?" Suddenly she seems hyperaware of her appearance, trying to pat down her hair with the palm of her hand as if covering the cause of it.

"It's gone." he spouts out, forgoing all the better ways to start a conversation.

She is rightly confused, "What is?"

"Gone." he keeps mumbling, "Gone. Gone. Gone—" already submerged in that section of his psyche where coherent thought goes to drown.

"Is it Jack?" she makes a guess. "Will, look at me. Focus." Her hands grip his shoulders, attempting to steady the man whose body parts are nervously twitching even as he's being held in place. His eyes linger. Her lipstick had been smeared on her chin. "Is this about Jack leaving?" she repeats.

He shakes his head, swallows, "No. Not Jack." then retraces his thoughts. "He left. _It_ vanished. Beth, too. I built it, like she asked. It's gone. I can't fix it. I don't know what to do."

"Will," she strokes his shoulders lightly, trying to tether him to reality. "I can't help if you're not being coherent. Why don't you come inside and tell me what's going on?"

"I—I can't tell you. It's dangerous. They could be watching. Listening. Whatever it is they do. I don't want you to get hurt. It would be my fault."

"Who's they?"

"My fault. It's all my—"

"Allie?" a male voice interferes. "Everything all right?"

"Yes, I'll be right back in."

A man steps into the doorway, looking underdressed in only a pair of briefs and an undershirt. His lips are stained with colour. He raises an eyebrow, "This him? The scientist guy?"

"Yes, this is him."

"Who are you?" Will retorts.

"I'm Allie's fiancé." he says.

"Shit." Will breathes out, connecting the dots at last. Even he cannot ignore these social cues. "Fuck. I shouldn't have come. I'm sorry."

She tries to counter his instincts, assuring him that it's okay, but he's already halfway down the stairs.

"I gotta go."

"Will!"

In his nescience he had assumed she would always be there for him, orbiting endlessly like a satellite even when he'd give nothing to pull her in, patiently waiting for their lives to glide back into the familiar routine once he'd done his share of world-saving. That they would grab coffee or lunch together, and—in silence or dug deep in a discussion—they would lose themselves in time. On free evenings they would rent horror DVDs and gorge on snacks. But eleven years have passed, they were both over thirty and she has outgrown his juvenile wishes. Sitting in his car in front of the Bradbury Swimming Pool, he allows himself sentiment. He mutters, "I've lost her, too."

He wishes he had kissed her, at least once. Just to know how she would feel. If intimacy with her would stir sensations others couldn't. He's eleven years too late to arrive at that thought.

Inside the swimming pool building, he lets the rust of the long-unused pipes to flush out first and then takes the coldest shower of his life, shivering before the first drop meets his skin. The catharsis comes as seizing cold, clenching muscles in his throat. For the first time in years he can feel the warmth of tears rolling down his cheeks as the baggage of the past eleven years starts pouring out of him. The contents of his stomach follow soon after.

His eyes linger on a broken tile and for a moment he ponders whether to take the sharp piece of ceramic to his jugular. The only escape-way he sees from the current peripeteia. He grips it tight, the palm of his hand closing into a fist until it stains with blood. The world is doomed to end and he has both condemned and failed to save it. He chokes out a sob, the first one in years and he's not sure whether it comes as a reaction to the pain or the hopelessness of the situation at large. Time around him drips away as he observes his blood and bile be swallowed by the drain.

His phone vibrates, pulling his mind into focus. Drenched, he makes his way across the room, dripping blood on the dusty floor. It's a message from Alison.

_I'm worried about you. The way you acted today was scary. Please seek out help. For Jack's sake, and mine._

She was right; even though the admission came by way of realisation that he had scared himself, too.

He fishes a relatively clean t-shirt out of the trunk of his car; he's been living like this for almost a month now—out of the trunk of his car. It'll have to do, at least it's dry. Then fishes a number out of his pocket—the phone he dials rings somewhere in the bowels of the swimming hall. He follows the sound of it until the voicemail takes over, then dials it again.

All that's left of her is a hand-me-down mattress from the local homeless shelter. A few cans of spray paint. A row of cardboard shooting targets, holey like a sifting sieve for bullets. A single handgun on a makeshift table. A wall of calendars marking down every single day since her arrival eleven years ago. He notes a red _x_ scratched out in today's date box. Beth had been here today.

It ignites a small spark of hope, returns a restless twitch into his hands; sends the thoughts a-spin. Now he has but to direct them.

He lifts the gun with his steadier hand, holding it between his nervous fingers. He wishes he had asked Beth to teach him to use it—for the assurance of its potency, to use against the shadows glued to his heels should they stop merely observing. A ludicrous thought, really. They were most likely trained killers. Even so, he never properly dismisses it and keeps the gun stashed in his briefcase for years onward.

While his mental faculties are still shackled by the immediate and memory has not yet given way to speculation, he tapes a video log for Beth—or her past-future iteration. To forewarn or retrodict.

Then he rolls up a joint and quietly smokes, sat on the angling floor of the swimming pool, staring at the implement with which he has shattered the very dimension he sought to explore. His foot nervously taps away moments until the drug begins to take effect. It slows the flow of his ideas until he can keep up with the tempo. They unfold in his mind like a roadmap—individual webs cohesively spun around singular concepts. One alerts him to Jack's birthday a month too late. Others analyse the incident at the workshop, alerting him to details he did not even realise he'd taken in. There are webs of panic and anxiety threatening to spill forth, and the fingers clutching the joint spasm instinctively. He draws the hypnotic smoke deeper into his lungs to shackle that line of thought.

One web still, spins the thread of possibility. He glares at the time machine for the longest while, recounting all the technical shortcomings that came with the era of its manufacturing, the missing failsafes he was able to theorise but never craft. His brain switches from linguistics to calculations, envisioning torrents of equations streaming against the backdrop of the now shut eyelids. And just like that, he finds a purpose again.

He would improve the machine.

Beth would need it to travel to the past to conceive the Countermeasure, and her partner to follow her through. In fact, he must have already completed the upgrades if Beth was able to travel to his workshop in 1999. It would seem obvious to anyone but him—his brain was a marvel in the areas of speculation and execution, but tardy when deduction was concerned.

The disaster, too, had offered some solace in the wake of his anagnorisis. The hypersaturation would provide a generous concentration of chronon particles to work with. Finally he would have the resources to enable passengers jump in time ranging from moments to decades and more.

He reaches for his phone and makes as if to call Alison, but the screen opens on her message, forcing him to re-read it. He recalls the previous incident and what he had interrupted. He decides not to press the issue now, in case they have resumed their copulating. The arrangements for his latest project would have to wait, jotted down as bullet points on a half crumpled paper.

Instead he dials the number of the only other important person still alive, only to get sent straight into voicemail.

Will exhales, "Jack. Hi. It's Will. I—" he stutters, not having planned out the conversation this far ahead. He latches onto the only thread he can come up with—an apology. "I guess you're in Thailand by now. I'm not sure if you even still use this number." His voice falters again, "I don't like how we left things. I'm… I've been under a lot of pressure." And an explanation, "There's some things I should tell you. I'd like to make it right." Finally, a plea, "Just… call me, okay? Please."

Needless to say, Jack never did call back.


End file.
